The keys to maintaining your weight loss

Some good news on the weight-loss front. Even if you've been a total flop before — regaining all the weight you lost and 10 pounds on top of that — you can be a dieting success.

"There's hope for all those people who have tried to lose weight and have not achieved long-term success," says J. Graham Thomas, who has studied the habits of "successful losers" through the National Weight Control Registry at Brown University Medical School (nwcr.ws).

Thomas studied the habits of some 6,000 adults who had lost 30 pounds or more and maintained the loss for at least one year. Nine out of ten of these success stories had a previous history of losing weight and putting it back on.

So, how did they take it off for good?

Writing in the American College of Sports Medicine's Health & Fitness Journal, Thomas boiled it down to "Seven Habits of Successful Weight Loss Maintainers."